In recent years, Brazil has built a sophisticated architecture to mediate contractual conflicts in concessions and PPPs. The Road Concession Contract Optimization Program, anchored in a decision by the Federal Court of Auditors and operationalized by the Ministry of Transport through Ordinance 848/2023, made it possible to renegotiate fourteen stressed contracts and around R$110 billion in investments planned until 2026. The cooperation agreement between TCU and AGU, in addition to Resolution 6,053/2024 of ANTT, which established the Regulatory Recovery Regime, consolidated a consensual environment for resolving impasses between concessionaires, agencies and the granting authority.
This progress is real and deserves to be celebrated. But it reveals, by contrast, an asymmetry that needs to be faced: while the vertical relationship, between the concessionaire and Brasília, gained forums, rites and governance instruments, the horizontal relationship, with the territory and its communities, continues to be treated as a liability to be managed, and not as a structuring variable of the project.
International literature calls this the social license to operate. The term, coined in 1997 by Canadian executive James Cooney in the mining sector, describes the continuous and informal acceptance that a company needs to obtain from the affected community to make its operations viable. Its absence produces concrete costs: stoppages, judicialization, delays in schedules and reputational erosion capable of compromising contract renewals.
The Enel crisis in São Paulo illustrates the cost of omission. The distributor accumulated prolonged blackouts in 2023, 2024 and 2025, fines totaling hundreds of millions of reais and a process at Aneel that could lead to the expiration of the concession. The technical problem, evident, was amplified by the public perception that the company did not dialogue with neighborhoods, city halls and users during emergencies. Enel was excluded from the early renewal package of fourteen distribution concessions in May 2026. Institutional capital eroded before economic capital.
At the other extreme, Aegea, through Águas de Manaus, brought treated water for the first time to approximately 200 thousand residents of alleys, stilt houses and riverside communities in the capital of Amazonas, supporting this expansion with instruments such as the Social Tariff and Tariff 10. In 2025, the company won the dispute to operate sanitation in 126 municipalities in Pará. The trajectory shows that investment in territorial ties does not compete with economic returns. He makes it possible.
Dialogue with local people and communities cannot be flat, standardized, like an off-the-shelf product. It is, rather, a customized work, which thinks about the territory with its respective characteristics – identifying leaders, city halls, public-public dialogues and with an aspect essentially focused on the interface between communication and infrastructure.
It is necessary to professionalize the territorial relationship within the concessionaires, moving it from the communication department to executive governance, with its own budget and reporting to the board.
Brasília’s effort to unlock concessions is worthy. But contracts are only executed where there is a highway, tunnel, electricity network or treatment plant, and this means within inhabited, organized territories with history and voice. Recognizing this reality is neither a concession to the ESG agenda nor reputational rhetoric. It is a material condition for the next generation of infrastructure investments to take place on time, at the cost and on the scale that the country needs.
*Gabriel Fajardo He is director of Concessions and Partnerships at Codemge (Minas Gerais Development Company). The lawyer and master in public administration from UFMG, was previously deputy secretary of Partnerships and Concessions in Rio Grande do Sul and undersecretary of Transport and Mobility in Minas Gerais.
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